Vibration suppression and attitude consensus control of multiple flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicles with external disturbances and actuator faults

This article focuses on the vibration suppression and attitude tracking consensus control of multiple flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of external disturbances and time varying actuator faults. Each flapping wing UAV equipped with a rigid-flexible coupled wing is modeled as partial differential equations (PDEs) with spatially varying coefficients. The hyperbolic tangent function is introduced to deal with the effect of external disturbances. The proposed disturbance rejection approach does not require prior knowledge of external disturbances. Adaptive tuning techniques are adopted to compensate for the system uncertainties caused by time varying actuator faults and external disturbances. A novel distributed fault tolerant boundary control is developed based on the connected and undirected graph to maintain the attitude consensus of multiple flapping wing UAVs and synchronously offset the vibrations of each flapping wing UAV. The uniformly bounded stability of multiple flapping wing UAVs with the designed control protocol is demonstrated by rigorous Lyapunov stability analysis. The control performance of the proposed approach is validated by simulations.